5 Steps for Social Listening on a Deadline

How can you incorporate social listening and insights on a tight timeline

Share this post:

by Morgan Johnstonbaugh

Working on deadline. We’ve all been there. Pulling together a campaign report for a meeting… this afternoon. The opportunity to win an exciting new account, and the pitch is in 4 days. Your boss calls and wants campaign metrics just as quickly as you can get them to her. How can you incorporate social listening and insights on such a tight timeline?

ForSight’s analytics technologies are perfect for in-depth research, and they are a great match for work on a fast timeline as well. Check out our 5 steps for social listening that combine lightning fast data processing and the hindsight view we have had for years.

1. Get your Bearings – Build a Buzz Monitor

Automated sentiment analysis is perfect for learning about a brand or industry that you know a lot or very little about. In ForSight, we call them “buzz monitors.” Requiring only a set of keywords, ForSight does the rest of the work for you by sorting posts into basic sentiment categories.

While buzz monitors require little from the analyst, they offer a plethora of insights. You can look at top retweets, mentions, basic sentiment, Affinities, gender, location, and more! In short, this is a great tool for orienting your research because you can get a better sense of who is participating in the conversation and what they are saying.

2. Chart your Course – Devise a Strategy

Often, your initial buzz monitor will produce more questions than answers, especially when you want to analyze a lot of data. Fortunately, ForSight offers users a wide variety of tools so that you can answer all of your questions in short order. Your strategy may include buzz monitors focusing on specific events, social account monitors of owned channels to expose your customer engagement and relationships, or a BrightView opinion monitor measuring the consumer life cycle. A combination of powerful social media analytics tools and the clarity of hindsight will allow you to take on the most challenging tasks with ease and confidence.

3. Set your Sails – Build Your Monitors

After devising a strategy, you can go deeper into your research and analysis. While training time varies by the type of monitor you create, from several minutes to several hours, data collection is a snap with a median time of 3.5 minutes for historical analysis of any duration. You might wait hours to simply collect data with other platforms. With ForSight’s social data library at your fingertips, you will already be far into analysis and report-building by then, rather than waiting around.

4. Trim the Sails – Investigate New Leads

With your findings in hand, you can build upon your initial analysis by combining data from the monitors that you have just run. As you analyze your findings, you may discover dead ends and new leads, a situation that highlights the importance of fast data processing.

With ForSight, you have to ability to extend your analysis to new topics, building monitors throughout the analysis process. This flexibility is vital for producing accurate results because social media is both complex and extensive.

5. Drop the Anchor – Publish your Findings

After navigating the seas of social media with ForSight, you have reached your destination. Efficient data collection helped your stay on schedule and gave you the flexibility to dive into the murky depths of social media.

You also arrived precisely where you were supposed to. Running monitors throughout allowed you to construct a thorough analysis, making comparisons, connections, and discoveries that aren’t possible using other tools. While you had expected the journey to be harrowing, ForSight helped you use hindsight to develop comprehensive social media insights.

Morgan Johnstonbaugh

Morgan is a Content Marketing Associate at Crimson Hexagon. She is a recent graduate of Wellesley College who enjoys applying her sociological training to the rapidly expanding field of social monitoring and analysis. When she isn't completing academic or marketing research, she can most often be found traveling, reading, or playing tennis.

Request a Demo

Ready to transform your business?

Get a walkthrough of Crimson Hexagon and learn how social insights can help you make better business decisions.

In Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Library of Babel, an infinite expanse of hexagonal rooms filled with books contained every possible arrangement of letters. For every important, beautiful, or useful book in this library there existed endless volumes of gibberish.

The only way to navigate this vast sea of meaningless information was to locate the Crimson Hexagon, the one room that contained a log of every other book in the library—a guide to extracting meaning from all the unstructured information.

Like Borges’ Crimson Hexagon, we aim to be a key to the world of social data, guiding your business and helping you uncover where to go next.